The Covid-19 pandemic has negatively affected labour markets, among other aspects of life. This study examines the impact of the discouraged worker effect during the pandemic, focusing on the Turkish labour market from 2018 to 2021. Although few studies exist on this topic, they rely on labour force participation rates, whereas our dataset includes direct questions and data specifically related to the discouraged worker effect, allowing for a microeconomic analysis. Probit regression results show that the discouraged worker effect was stronger during the pandemic, with job seekers being 1.6% more likely to become discouraged than before. Higher education levels generally reduce this likelihood, both before and during the pandemic. While age negatively correlates with discouragement, this effect diminishes with increasing age. Single women were more adversely affected than single men and married women than married men. Higher unemployment rates increase discouragement, as expected, while an increase in the unemployment rate has a greater effect on individuals during the pandemic period. Findings suggest that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on certain individuals, particularly with respect to education level and gender, while Türkiye’s societal structure may help explain the observed gender-based differences.

This article explores how young people in Norilsk – Russia’s largest Arctic city and a global exemplar of industrial monotown development – negotiate their futures amid extreme environmental challenges, social isolation, and economic uncertainty. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with vocational students of industrial specialisations, the paper examines the ways in which youth navigate a unique “here” (Norilsk) versus “on the mainland” (the rest of Russia) divide that shapes both lived experience and imagined mobility. The analysis reveals that youth typically approach life in Norilsk as a temporary, but agentic strategy: they seek financial security and work experience locally before considering uncertain migration elsewhere. This calculated “staying,” termed “permanent temporality,” is influenced by limited educational and career opportunities, strong vocational pipelines, and family narratives that valorise the accumulation of a “safety cushion” prior to moving. While Norilsk offers predictability and stability, it is rarely seen as a place for long-term residence or generational settlement. The findings challenge assumptions of Arctic youth passivity or inevitable depopulation, highlighting instead the adaptive agency young people display in a context of structural constraint. The study situates these strategies between broader transformations in Russian education, shifting value attached to vocational and university pathways, and the specific vulnerabilities of Arctic urban environments. The article concludes by discussing the implications for regional policy, urban sustainability, and broader understandings of youth transition and mobility under conditions of global peripherality and rapid socioeconomic change.

There is much discussion about the inability of political systems in democratic countries to deal with a range of problems, aspects of which all to some extent relate to the current evolution of global economic growth and its environmental consequences. The paper explores some long-term underlying causes of the inability of national political systems to adapt to global markets in trade and labour. This is primarily because of how the nation state developed over the long term as a means of providing employment and basic necessities to its subjects and citizens.

This study explores the gender wage gap in Türkiye between 2013 and 2022 using a novel 10-year panel dataset constructed with administrative data compiled for the first time in Türkiye, which includes approximately 14 million full-year workers in 360 subgroups by demographic, sectoral, and occupational factors. The analysis examines the long-term effects of demographic factors, such as age, education, and marital status, as well as the work-related factors, including occupation and employment sector, on the gender wage gap. The findings reveal that men working full-time in formal employment earn 10.1% more than women in Türkiye, and the study shows evidence of how the gender wage gap varies across different demographic groups. The results obtained emphasise the significant roles of marital status, occupation, age, and sector in explaining the wage differential, while education is shown not have a meaningful long-term impact on the wage gap. Moreover, contrary to expectations, the study confirms that occupational experience, the aging labour force, and increased female labour force participation contribute to the widening of the gender wage gap. These findings underline the need for targeted economic and social policies to address gender-based wage differences in a country where the labour force participation of women has traditionally been outstandingly low. This study aims to contribute to the literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of a large-scale dataset that offers new insights into gender wage differences.

This paper provides an overview of post-study employability for students of linguistics. We begin with a review of the literature on employability, education, and skills. We then conduct an analysis of fifty-one interviews with people who studied linguistics and went on to work in a diverse range of occupations. We provide a summary of the interview participants, and then conduct an analysis of the domain-specific and transferable skills reported and the advice offered in these interviews. Finally, we look at how linguistics programs can use the existing literature and insights from these interviews to help their students think about careers.

The Bologna Process is advancing at full speed, although the unintended effects it is causing are complained about everywhere. Yet, we do not witness unintended effects alone, but a fundamental societal change that embraces more than is widely recognised. This change is geared to replacing the occupational professional model of mediation between education and employment with the market model. Against the backdrop of the traditional German focus on occupations, that change appears as particularly radical.

This study attempts to answer a perennial question asked of and by every student of linguistics: ‘What can you do with this degree?’. We address the question through an in-depth analysis of administrative and tax data from Statistics Canada (2009–2018). Specifically, this article (i) maps out educational and employment pathways of linguistics graduates in Canada, (ii) compares their earnings to graduates from other ‘competitor’ programs that future linguists consider as viable alternatives, and (iii) verifies the range of careers advertised by linguistics departments against the reality of the industries in which graduates from those departments are employed. These findings enable us to draw conclusions about the optimal and suboptimal educational and career pathways that involve a linguistics degree. Linguistics graduates tend to earn less than their peers in comparable programs, unless they pursue a lengthy educational path. The findings also point to a partial mismatch between potential careers advertised by Canadian linguistics departments and actual areas of employment after graduating with a linguistics degree. We provide suggestions for linguistics departments on how best to align the policies and practices of these programs with the ground truth of the labor market.

This paper examines the effects of practical and emotional social support to changes in personal and vocational wellbeing of employees and training participants of social purpose enterprises. This study finds that among participants with lower baseline optimism and self-esteem, those who found the practical social support from their organization to be more relevant to their work outcomes had significantly higher optimism and self-esteem at the time of the survey, compared to other low baseline participants who had assigned less importance to their work-centred practical support. Social support did not influence those with high baseline scores in optimism and self-esteem, or changes to self-efficacy and vocational identity. Implications on support intervention within social purpose enterprises and for the broader field of social enterprise research are discussed.

Previous studies have found that employment in the voluntary sector offers a so-called ‘job satisfaction premium’: despite lower salaries, voluntary sector employees are more satisfied with their jobs than workers in other sectors. This paper examines whether voluntary sector employees also experience a subjective well-being premium. Using data from the UK Annual Population Survey 2012/2013, we find that voluntary sector employees do have higher levels of subjective well-being but this subjective well-being premium is not evenly distributed between men and women. While both men and women in the voluntary sector experience higher levels of fulfilment than private sector employees, only men have higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction. Women in the voluntary sector have lower life satisfaction than their public sector counterparts. We discuss the implications of our findings for policy and practice in the voluntary sector in the UK.

While there is consensus about the combined relevance of liberal regime policies and gendered employment and family trajectories in adulthood, for shaping employment in later life, so far there is no single cross-national study simultaneously addressing these dimensions. Drawing on exceptionally rich, harmonised life history data, we explore the association between employment and family patterns in adulthood, and the prevalence, duration and diversity of extended working lives beyond full pension age, among men and women in four predominantly liberal countries: two from Europe (England and Switzerland) and two from the Americas (the United States and Chile). Our findings indicate that employment trajectories – unlike partnership and fertility trajectories – play a significant role in shaping the prevalence, duration and diversity of later-life employment across the four countries examined. Furthermore, gender differences in later-life employment patterns are particularly notable in England and Chile. Our comparative perspective reveals that while liberal regimes share certain characteristics, they also exhibit significant diversity in how extended working lives manifest and are influenced by lifecourse trajectories.